Nonsensicles

Let me start off by saying that All Clear isn’t bad. Or rather, these two books aren’t bad. You might want to start with my review of Blackout, if you haven’t already.

The books are interesting, engaging page turners. You want to find out how the characters get out of tricky  and dangerous situations. You really care about what happens to them. If that’s enough for you in a novel, then stop reading, because I have a few issues with this one.

This review is mildly spoilery, FYI.

My first problem is that she wrote two books. This story is unjustifiably long. Willis could have cut a third out of the middle and it would have made the whole experience better. It feels well padded.

Old episodes of Doctor Who have a reputation for sending the characters  running up and down corridors most of the time. They had no budget and four episodes to fill out, so they’d have the actors run down the same corridor over and over, heading to and from various dangers.

All Clear (and Blackout) does the same thing. The characters all experience the same worries over and over and over again. Each character brings up the same concerns about terrible things that might happen or have happened, with maybe the slightest twist each time. Often the character will raise that concern with another character and we’ll watch the second pserson worry about it all over again.

The characters also frequently make baffling decisions. They withhold information from their companions for the flimsiest of reasons. Particularly since those secrets usually have a profound bearing on their particular situation or that might prove valuable if shared. Another character chooses to make a truly mind-boggling decision halfway through the book that, while dramatic, in unnecessary.

However, my biggest issue with All Clear is that Willis doesn’t play straight with us. She presents new characters in different time zones without introduction. Based on my reading, she has deliberately chosen to make it unclear that we’ve already met these people. When I read a new character with a new name, I assume this is a new person. To find out that it’s actually the same person as the other chapter, just at a different point in their time line, .

Picture a movie made from this book. We’d know immediately that the woman in time zone A was the same woman in time zone B. The filmmaker would find a better way to tell the story than by deliberately withholding information. I expect that some people don’t mind this technique, but I felt taken advantage of and deliberately misled.

All Clear has a lot of potential. This would be an awesome early draft. It’s got the characters and plot to make a really good novel. But she needs to cut out a lot. She needs to work out the characters motivations and decisions. And she needs to make some choices about how to present the overlapping time lines in a more honest way.

It’s a shame because these really could have been truly epic and they just aren’t.

I started reading Blackout, by Connie Willis, with some trepidation. While I had loved two of her earlier books, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book, the last book I read from her was Passage. I had started reading Passage with enthusiasm, since her prior books had been so good. It was kind of like expecting to bite down on an ice cream sundae and getting a mouthful of broken glass, instead. It was that bad.

So I haven’t read anything else she’s written since then and, for reasons Pavlov can explain to you, was extremely worried when I saw she was nominated with not one, but two books. The first of these was Blackout (followed quickly by All Clear – really it’s one long book split into two).

Let me start off with the positive: Blackout is an extremely readable page turner. The dialogue is snappy, the characters are dynamic and the book flies along. It’s got a lot of the qualities (and a number of the characters) that I loved in those first two books. It features a group of Oxford historians, who use time travel to visit important events so that they can write papers on them. I love the academic nature of what they’re doing, particularly the almost banal nature of the some of the assignments they’re taking on.

However, she has some editing problems. I’d argue cutting material is the number one thing keeping Connie Willis from being  a truly great writer. For reasons I’ll get into when I review Blackout, I don’t think this needed to be two books. There was plenty to cut in both of these.

Overlong, repetitious sections aren’t the worst offense in Blackout, though. Most of the time, we know exactly who the narrator is, but Willis occasionally starts (and often ends) chapters without telling us whose perspective we’re sharing. I’m completely baffled as to why she’s done this, since it wouldn’t work in any other medium, particularly when it is a character we’ve met before, using another name. It feels like a cheat because it is a cheat.

When you have to search back through the book to figure out if you should know what’s going on, that’s a bad thing.

Willis seems to expect quite a bit of her readers. This is okay if it deepens the mystery, but we’re talking about minutia here.  For example, most chapters end in a cliffhanger, but the nature of the surprise is often baffling. Sometimes it’s the date, or some specific location or event that should apparently be significant. I have a pretty good understanding of the events of World War II, but she seems to assume we understand it as well as the characters do. I often backtracked to make sure I hadn’t missed a page, because that couldn’t possibly have been considered an ending point.

Like I said, this is a page turner, and I will hold out judgment until I read the second part. But Connie’s work has been tarnished for me. It’s like an annoying sound you don’t hear until someone points it out; I can’t stop noticing the flaws in her writing.